'Bad Blood': When Love Without Love Gets Dangerous

By WALTER GOODMAN

Published: April 27, 2001

ad Blood" was shown as part of the 1987 New York Film Festival. Following are excerpts from Walter Goodman's review, which appeared in The New York Times on Sept. 30, 1987. The film, in French with English subtitles, opens today at Cinema Village, 22 East 12th Street, Greenwich Village.

The pictures are in charge in Léos Carax's "Bad Blood." Most of the scenes seem to have been improvised in the interests of a striking shot, and the characters are in thrall to the camera. In this, his second feature, Mr. Carax lives up to his billing as "the natural heir of Jean- Luc Godard," showing a taste for underground types and milieus, an inventive eye and a tolerance for tedium.

The plot is simpler than it appears. Alex (Denis Lavant), a small-time Paris hustler with very fast hands and a cigarette growing from between his lips, is inveigled into a superheist by Marc (Michel Piccoli) and Hans (Hans Meyer). In need of thousands to pay off a sinister American woman, they plan to steal a virus culture from a big chemical company. The virus works against a fast-spreading and often fatal disease, STB, which strikes people who "make love without love."

An ailment with a moral. But Mr. Carax, who also wrote the murky script, doesn't show much concern for its consequences. One minor character appears to have been infected, but we are left to guess how come or so what. As for that big heist, when it finally comes off, the movie goes surrealistic, losing whatever crime-story tension has been built up. Instead of showing how Alex does the job, Mr. Carax lays on visual effects, like an overhead shot of a squad of cops assuming a geometrical pattern for the camera's benefit.

It's the images, as cinéastes like to call them, that drive Mr. Carax. Some are stunners, in particular a dizzying rescue by parachute. It's so exciting and has so little to do with the plot that you can't help suspecting the characters were sent up in the plane solely so the photographer, Jean-Yves Escoffier, could do his stuff. Mr. Carax shows a special liking for overhead shots, shots of people racing or dancing past gritty walls, mirror shots and close-ups of faces with fuzzy figures visible in the background. Since many of the prolonged close-ups are of the beautiful Juliette Binoche (who plays Anna, Marc's languorous mistress and the love of Alex's life), they are not unpleasing.

Mr. Carax makes much of speed and dramatic plays of light. But while the screen flashes and flickers, little else is happening. Not all his reflecting tricks can make the half- hour conversation between Anna and Alex seem less than three hours long.

There are some funny moments: Alex does a vaudeville routine that ends with vegetables pouring onto his head; he and Anna kid around with shaving-cream beards; Halley's Comet is blamed for both a hot spell and a snowstorm. You may wonder at such times whether "Bad Blood" is meant as parody of the whole film noir line.

The main set, the apartment where the bare-chested criminals do their plotting, is on a street steeped in shadows, except for a couple of big abstract paintings at the far end. If it's symbols you're after, that's a pretty good one for this movie, touches of color in the gloom.